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56 Am. J. Pol. Sci. 1 (2012)

handle is hein.journals/amjorpolisci56 and id is 1 raw text is: Social Welfare as Small-Scale Help: Evolutionary Psychology and the Deservingness Heuristic Michael Bang Petersen Aarhus University Public opinion concerning social welfare is largely driven by perceptions of recipient deservingness. Extant research has argued that this heuristic is learned from a variety of cultural, institutional, and ideological sources. The present article provides evidence supporting a different view: that the deservingness heuristic is rooted in psychological categories that evolved over the course of human evolution to regulate small-scale exchanges of help. To testpredictions made on the basis of this view, a method designed to measure social categorization is embedded in nationally representative surveys conducted in different countries. Across the national- and individual-level differences that extant research has used to explain the heuristic, people categorize welfare recipients on the basis of whether they are lazy or unlucky. This mode of categorization furthermore induces people to think about large-scale welfare politics as its presumed ancestral equivalent: small-scale help giving. The general implications for research on heuristics are discussed. elfare spending constitutes a major part of the government budget of developed democ- racies, and voters consider many of the core responsibilities of the welfare state, such as education, health care, and care for the elderly, as being highly im- portant (Gilens 2000). Given the political and fiscal im- portance of welfare, one could perhaps expect people to form opinions on welfare policies via a detailed exami- nation of their content and economic effectiveness. Yet research shows that people predominantly rely on a sim- ple heuristic: do the recipients deserve the benefits or not (e.g., Gilens 2000; Oorschot 2000; Petersen et al. 2011; Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991)? This deserving- ness heuristic prompts people to categorize recipients as deserving or undeserving on the basis of recipient effort. People strongly oppose welfare spending benefiting indi- viduals they regard as lazy, while they are quite supportive ofbenefits to the unlucky-i.e., those who try but fail due to circumstances beyond their control. The first step when using the deservingness heuristic to treat lazy and unlucky welfare recipients differently is a psychological act of categorization: the recipients must be categorized as the one or the other. Political science research has provided clear insights into the proximate factors governing this process (e.g., Oorschot 2000) and illuminated important national and individual differ- ences in people's default tendencies to view welfare recip- ients as lazy or unlucky. For example, individuals living in residual welfare states such as the United States (Larsen 2006) or individuals on the ideological right wing are much more prone to think of welfare recipients as lazy (Skitka and Tetlock 1993). At the same time, systematic studies examining the ultimate roots ofthis categorization process have been lacking. That is, while we know much about the sources of individual differences in perceptions of recipient effort, we do not know why these perceptions of recipient effort are, in the first place, so psychologically important during the formation of welfare opinions. One prominent researcher simply concedes that this is an open question (Oorschot 2006). Other researchers have argued that the very same sources that create varia- tions in the perceptions of recipient effort are themselves responsible for their psychological importance and have pointed to, for example, individualism, policy feedback Michael Bang Petersen is Associate Professor of Political Science and Government, Aarhus University, Bartholins All& 7, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark (michael@ps.au.dk). I thank Lene Aaroe, Leda Cosmides, Pete Hatemi, Rob Kurzban, Andreas Roepstorff, Rune Slothuus, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Rune Stubager, Kim Mannemar Sonderskov, Jesper Sorensen, four anonymous reviewers, and Editor Rick K. Wilson for thorough advice and comments in the preparation of this article. This research was funded by a grant from the Danish Research Foundation to the author (grant #275-07-0068). Replication data are stored at the Danish Data Archive (http://samfund.dda.dk/default-en.asp). American Journal ofPolitical Science, Vol. 56, No. 1, January 2012, Pp. 1-16 02011, Midwest Political Science Association DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2011.00545.x 1